Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do decision-makers’ strategies of integrating different risks depend on framing? In the present study, participants were either instructed that they were choosing between two solutions to a complex problem or between two generic options. The former was framed as an industrial scenario that required choices between modifying and replacing a module (Adapt or Exchange). The risk was higher for Adapt to harm the product and for Exchange to harm the plant. Participants were either told that the consequences of both risks were equally severe (content-same group), or that harming the plant was worse (content-different group). A third group received a generic task framing (no-content group). We expected framing to affect risk integration, inducing different choices and strategies in the content-same than the no-content group. The data refuted this hypothesis, but decisions clearly diverged from the content-different group. These findings question whether ecological validity can be enhanced merely by framing.